Rent, Gaza and Understanding the Gospel

Rent, Gaza and Understanding of the Gospel

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I suspect that new influences I allowed to come my way in the past few days have begun to transform my understanding some dimensions of the Gospel. For the first time in my life I watched the movie “Rent”. I also began following some Twitter accounts of Palestinians living in Gaza. I am a Christian and a fairly Conservative one, at least in my own mind. But this week I have begun to realize more deeply than before that if Christ has come into the world to embrace humanity and to build a new creation that he does so by embracing that portion of humanity which we imagine separated from him by moral behavior, and national or religious identification. This is not to say that moral behavior or religious beliefs are unimportant, but it is to say that Christ has come into the world to bridge those gaps and to call upon us to follow him as we desire to see God’s kingdom characterized by mercy, love and justice established upon the earth forevermore. I write as a Christian but I write more than ever as one who knows that it is not my job to convert or change anyone, but my job is to be an expression of God’s love in Christ. If the Christian is meant to be an ambassador in Christ’s service it is the ambassador’s role to represent his Lord and sovereign by treating those to whom he is sent with dignity and respect. So it is that I hope from this day forth to so act faithfully to our Lord and respectfully to those to whom the Lord would have me speak and write.

            A few years ago I would not likely have watched the movie “Rent” because it sometimes represents in a favorable way the sort of content I would rather not have chosen to contemplate. But a few days ago one of the persons I follow on Twitter had posted a quote without telling its source and I replied about how wonderful the writing of the quote was. The one who posted it replied to me that it was from the movie “Rent” and she described it as a beautiful movie. I knew little about it, read the blurbs about it and decided to watch it anyway because part of me says I need to face the thinking and culture of our day. I am grateful that I did because as I watched the movie I decided that no matter how we might feel about the moral divisions within human behavior, Christ came to embrace all of humanity and not just a moral majority or minority. I realize that he came to save sinners and so it is my need not to put a roadblock in the way, but rather to be a representative of God’s love for humanity. My work as a Christian is not to write someone out of the grace of God but to express to them God’s love for the world in Christ. I know that also represents speaking truth in love, but I am more and more inclined to believe that of first priority is that I convey that Christ has come into this world to reclaim humanity and to invite each of us to come, follow him, and be part of the building of God’s kingdom; a kingdom of love empowered to overcome evil by faith working through love.

            In the midst of the movie “Rent” there was a line that captured my attention and spoke to my soul. The words of the line were “The opposite of war is not peace. The opposite of war is creation.” I thought about that. We so often imagine that peace, which sometimes is no more than a cessation of fighting is the opposite of war. But often peace is an intermission in a war. That is the sort of peace that hung over Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s. That is the kind of peace many people in the Middle East have experienced. That is not the opposite of war.

The opposite of war is creation. In war humanity kills and destroys one another. When humanity creates with God’s help we build to create the things that allow for the richness and abundance of life.  I was thinking of these things as I noticed a re-tweet of a quote by a Palestinian from Gaza with a Twitter account. Sometimes I realize the need I have to be exposed to a broader part of the world than I have allowed myself to know. I decided to let myself listen in to what a Palestinian from Gaza had to say.

I looked at a couple of profiles of the Palestinians on Twitter. In a profile the person on Twitter writes a description of themselves. I wrote for my profile that I usually think I have something to say, but usually it is more important that I listen. I invited people to drop in on my page. There is so much hope and expressions of interests on the American profiles I visit. But the first two Palestinians who wrote something about themselves showed to me that they feel a sense of despair regarding their place in the world. One of my first two visits to a Gaza Palestinian profile simply said “I do not exist.” The second person wrote “You must be lost.” In other words they were both seeking through their pages to say something about being Palestinian. They understand that most of the world is indifferent about their sufferings. One says defiantly “I don’t exist” because most of the world ignores Palestinian existence. The other says defiantly “you must be lost” because it is generally not intentional that we notice a Palestinian’s humanity.

I had learned before I ever looked at these profiles that we seldom see the pain of the Palestinian experience, especially in Gaza. Israeli blockades do more than prevent weapons from entering the region of Gaza. So many items deemed as having a potential for use in fighting are banned that the only way Gaza’s economy can do anything but provide a minimal survival just above starvation is for a black market to exist through smuggling goods into the region. As someone wrote a while back the tunnels that link Gaza to places outside of Gaza are as much to move chocolate for someone to celebrate a special event as it is for weapons. Life without a black market of goods smuggled around the blockade would be extremely depressing in a region that can be described as a large open air penitentiary. If Israel imagines it can wipe out terrorism using such methods it only creates a situation where people who have lost hope for the future are willing to go out in a vain act of defiance. There is a potent frustration that easily moves towards anger in the situation. A tweet that caught my attention shows a hardened reality of what passes for news in the world. The tweet reads “Journalism is when someone writes something no one wants published. Everything else is public relations.” Few Americans understand and perhaps just as few even care about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. I would ask you to take the time to watch this video to realize the extent of damage the latest few days of war ravaged upon the residents of Gaza. You can also look at the still photograph beneath these words where someone looks out from his demolished residence over the rubble of the bombed out city of Gaza.

 

A Palestinian’s photograph of where their home once existed in Gaza

 

            From “Rent” to Gaza I began, in the weakness of my own Christianity, to see God’s love for this world in Jesus Christ in greater clarity. Christ came into this world to reach out to all sorts of humanity. He has come to embrace a humanity whose morality was anything but complete. If we are sinless we might throw out the first stone, but otherwise we are among the amoral and immoral portions of humanity, whose humanity Christ has embraced because God has loved us.

            The days are over according to the Gospel when a dividing wall favors one people and one nation over another. When Christ spoke to men and women he bridged the gap between nations. When St. Paul spoke to people with a different religion he spoke of the unknown God whom the nations actually already knew.

            Mostly I want everyone reading this to know that no matter how poorly we Christians show God’s love for the world, Jesus Christ has come into this world to embrace men and women in their humanity despite their morality, their religion or their nationality. He has come to bring peace, not the peace which is merely a stoppage of war. Christ has come to call us to a new creation, to build a new world in which dwells righteousness, justice, goodness, mercy and love. I know such thoughts sound like they are only beautiful words. I suspect if a Palestinian from Gaza reads these words they will sound empty coming from a Christian with all the blood spilt between Christians and Muslims through the centuries. But perhaps what I write is not so much addressed to Palestinians as to my fellow Christians in the West.  Perhaps I only hope to encourage my fellow Christians to believe that God loves the Palestinian people. If my fellow Christians really believed that God loved the Palestinian people we would yearn to see them at peace and able to work on building lives full of hope, beauty and joy. Maybe we can’t expect the Palestinian people to believe that God loves them in Christ until we believe that God loves them in Christ. Perhaps when we learn to believe that God loves people in Christ, then everything will change.